Friday, October 01, 2010

Dish Network subscribers could have trouble seeing their favorite college hockey team this weekend after Fox Networks blocked 19 regional sports networks in a rate increase dispute.

DU, Minnesota, North Dakota, CCHA and Hockey East games regularly appear on the various Fox Regional channels.

"Fox is demanding a new contract with an unprecedented rate increase of more than 50%," said Dish, in a press release Friday.

A source at Fox, who asked not to be named, referred to the 50% increase as "gross overstatement" on the part of Dish.

Dish (DISH, Fortune 500) accused Fox of trying to "intimidate Dish Network and its customers into paying the rate increase. Fox has flatly refused Dish Network's request to allow customers to continue to watch these Fox channels during the negotiations."

Fox Networks released a statement saying that Dish "decided to no longer carry Fox Networks cable programming" as of midnight, Sept. 30.

A: I don't know what's going to happen for sure. I hear Penn State is starting a program and building an arena. It's hard, hard to get into a conference. They are talking about it. There's got to be a lot of thought that goes into it if the Big Ten schools are going to get together at the expense of hurting college hockey. If you have 55 (58) schools playing hockey and five fold because of that, you better know what you're doing.

(Five programs would fold? Blais said it could happen in the CCHA if it loses three teams to the Big Ten. He had some strong words for the Big Ten schools in the WCHA. “Barry Alvarez, the Wisconsin athletic director, has been pushing this. He's a football guy. Does he know anything about hockey? This could really hurt the sport. Minnesota and Wisconsin have to think about the backlash in future schedules. What's keeping everyone from blackballing them and making them look east?”)

I just noticed the logo on Fox Sports...a subsidiary of Direct TV. This isn't a surprise. Seems that Direct TV and other cable companies are becoming very incestious with various networks and attempting to gouge Dish Network on a regular basis.

I think it's a pitty that more DU games aren't on FSNRM. We come home from the UND games and watch the third period of the DU games when they are on... DU is big time program and their games should be on TV and FCS.

I am sure he is feverishly working on it. Let me guess, some big spread about how great DU is an how honorable the program is. Followed by UND hockey players being thugs....ect, ect. Same old useless information. Snap-cap business is slow these days